A Meditation on Orange in the Green Allegany

This time of year, Allegany State Park riots with green, so I go into the woods searching for orange. It is there, but I need to slow down to find it.

A journey into the woods is a journey into the self, but it is easy to miss silent moments of meaning when I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur of scale. I found that out under the giant sequoia trees where the spectacle of nature overwhelmed me until I understood how to look at it. It happened to me again on the floor of Kings Canyon when the depth of the canyon walls meant that at first I missed much of what was meaningful there.

Here, in Allegany, the fifty foot birch trees and their leaves create a celebration of one color. It’s easy to slip into a kind of green meditation; there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but today, I want to see beyond the green.

In two months, the forest will be full of the oranges of fall. Right now, that color is rare and precious. I find it in the mushroom called chicken of the woods. It’s a giant orange fungus that you can eat if you know how to prepare it. I won’t do that myself. I don’t trust my foraging skills, and I’d rather leave it for an animal that needs it. Besides, what moves me is the sight of it, standing out among all this green.

I find orange in the copper run off of a stream flowing through a mineral deposit. This is a creek that has no name as far as I know, and I’m glad of it. It is a miracle of orange inside a green world. It is made more miraculous for being unnamed and unknown to anyone I know except for me. Others have seen it, but I don’t know those people. It is my personal miracle, my own spot for me.

I find orange too in the tiny eastern newt. I just moved here from Southern California, where little reptiles are green or brown. Sometimes they’re tan. This is a new creature for me. It is orange and slow-moving in the cool morning.

Tomorrow, I might move through these woods more quickly, happy to live in a green Allegany, and that will be fine too. Today, however, is a time for slowness, for contemplation, for orange.